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Anyway, I don't really care that much. It's a rather odd thing for facebook to buy is all. Do they think they're Google now or something?

There is some speculation that the purchase was motivated by Facebook wanting to be able to position something as a competitor to Glass. Google's push into wearables isn't going away, and if the consumer version of Google Glass manages to take off when it hits (which is a pretty big 'if'), facebook will be scrambling to catch up. With WOM and perception of Oculus being much more positive than for Glass, they might be able to have a valid competitor.

Thought this could be of help/interesting for people who have (or are considering/will get later) an Oculus Rift or other VR device:
Gamasutra: Simulator Sickness

Also, on the whole FB owns Oculus now:

Yeah I thought it was a particularly weird partnership, but if what I've heard about the deal is true they are at least in the short-term letting Oculus continue to do what they do. We'll just have to wait and see what FB ends up doing with Oculus as time goes on.

There's no longer an OCULUS RIFT on my FACE because I brought it back to work. But here's something cool I found. Some of you may have seen an earlier video by this guy where he set up 3 Kinect cameras to capture and insert himself into the simulation, in this video he takes it even further and goes outside of his body as well. It's pretty mindblowingly futuristic stuff. The best part is when he accidentally yanks the cord of one of the Kinect cameras and parts of him get unaligned with the rest. Crazy.

I was just thinking about the death of video stores this morning, and the cultural loss of the experience of wandering the aisles, poking through shelves to find lord-knows-what obscure films. What we have now, with Netflix, streaming, et al is of course much more efficient, but completely sucks the joy out of discovery. (Ditto for bookstores.)

So I wonder if the sort of cheap, high-quality VR that Oculus Rift promises could give rise to virtual video stores, where Netflix or whoever builds a 3D space, populates it with a selection of movies based on whatever algorithm, then lets you loose in it to browse.

I could see it happening in a small scale way if not large scale. I mean I've already heard of a virtual movie theater for the Rift. What's kind of funny is that Chuck E Cheese's is trialing the OR for some ticket game for kids. If it's successful I could see other companies looking at that and thinking about utilizing the Rift themselves.

One thing I still wonder about is the nausea issue for the average consumer. I've heard that the OR Dev Kit 2 lessons latency.

I was just thinking about the death of video stores this morning, and the cultural loss of the experience of wandering the aisles, poking through shelves to find lord-knows-what obscure films. What we have now, with Netflix, streaming, et al is of course much more efficient, but completely sucks the joy out of discovery. (Ditto for bookstores.)

So I wonder if the sort of cheap, high-quality VR that Oculus Rift promises could give rise to virtual video stores, where Netflix or whoever builds a 3D space, populates it with a selection of movies based on whatever algorithm, then lets you loose in it to browse.

Eh, probably not.

Not exactly what you're thinking of, but retailers are definitely playing around with Oculus; there's this story about Tesco from a couple of months ago.

Heh, I don't think virtual stores will be much more successful than the attempts at "3D internet" that have been made. Sure it'd be neat, but simply navigating a website is still much faster and easier than a virtual store.

I still think a videostore could be a cool idea, but more for the nostalgic value than the shopping aspect. Just being in a place in VR is pretty cool and I can see virtual tourism/timetravel being a thing. Like maybe in a few years when you're browsing Wikipedia you'll be able to visit 3D recreations of famous locales instead of just looking at photos of them. Or maybe Google will upgrade their Streetview cameras to capture depth as well so there could be actual 3D recreations of all the streets, and you could walk along them! Speculations! (of course none of these things would require VR, but they'd be way cooler with it, trust me)

As voxel tech improves, they'll be able to 3D scan massive landscapes, so having a VR mirror world is in the cards I think.

Then the two get linked (real & virtual world), and the tech gets shrunk to glasses and as ubiquitus as smart phones, and now we're talking about full on Augmented Reality as the masses' everyday reality.

That reads like a bunch of lawyers trying to justify their wages to the CEO and board.

Except Robert Altman (this one, not that one), current CEO of Zenimax, actually IS a lawyer. One with a very shady background. Once you understand that, things like this case, the ones against Interplay and the one against Notch begin to make sense.
The guy's sue-happy.

What's weird is that I still don't think I understand what they're actually doing with it. Non-interactive VR media? I mean, I suppose that's cool, but it doesn't quite exist per se on any mass-market scale. Maybe it will, soon. Computer animated movies, for sure. And maybe they'll manage to shoot movies in a way that they can be watched in full VR, although I'm having trouble imagining an adequate camera setup?